Welcome back everyone. I am cast PNC and I'm joined as
usual by my partner in crime. Mr. Bennett Tomlin how are you
today? I'm doing well.
Cass, how are you? I'm hanging in there honestly,
I've been trying to wrap my head around Tara.
Today, we planned on doing this episode while ago, but I'm going
to come forward and say that I I've never taken algorithmic
stable coin. Seriously, it's not something.
Ever thought would gain or Garner attention.
Clearly, I was wrong about that. So I'm willing to admit that
much. But I'm not yet willing to
concede is that my belief is that they always fail.
That's my belief I guess based on the fact that none of them
have succeeded as of yet, but I'm sure we'll have some
pushback on that comment in and of itself because if I recall
correctly, Matt Levine did his normal newsletter and the the An
omen that you had a debate with decided to reach out to Matt
Levine, to tell him how wrong he was about algorithmic stable
coin. So first of all, you know, this
one is about Tara, it's not about fracks but will include
that episode, you did on blockchain debate podcast in the
show notes. But, look, I went on their site
and what I decided to do before we jumped on was learn as much
as I could about Tara based on what their website was telling
me. I didn't learn very much but I
would love to hear your explanation of how Tara Because
when they try to get into how it works, they make it so simple
that it's incredibly vague. Yeah, algorithmic stable coins
in general are all a well-coordinated game in trying
to convince a sufficient mass of people that a thing that has no
reason to be valuable is definitely valuable, right?
And so Tara is effectively collateralized by the governance
token Luna. So the way this works is Is
through the protocol. You can exchange about a dollars
worth of Luna for a dollars worth of Tara USD, which I'll
probably just called Terra for the rest of this episode or vice
versa. You can exchange one Tara for
about a dollars worth of Luna, and this is the main thing that
is meant to keep Tara at Peg. The fact that you can get Luna
for it and that's, that's the whole thing is that if we all
assume Luna is valuable, then we can use it as collateral to make
this thing. That kind of looks like a
currency and as long as Lunas valuable and as long as enough
people think the currency like thing is valuable.
Then it continues working. The issue becomes if people stop
believing either of those things so they're just doing Fiat.
Yeah. No.
No, they really are and like algorithmic, stable coins, are
one of the purest examples of that I think.
And like this is the difficulty with hair, has a lot of the
things terraform labs are doing our unsustainable.
So, let's start with the anchor. A lending Market terraform Labs
the company behind Tara supports.
This provides funds for their yield Reserve so that they can
pay out a higher interest rate to lenders than the market
actually wants to give them and so by paying out this twenty
percent guaranteed interest rate, they hope to help Drive
demand for UST and in driving demand for UST, they hope it
continues to grow to such a point that it hits some kind of
inflection point or Tipping Point where there's such a
Belief in it in such an exotic - demand for it that you no longer
need to do the unsustainable things.
Unlike terraform labs in lunatics and all the people
behind Tara will admit that many of these things are
unsustainable, right? Like continuing to subsidize
everyone who wants to lend this token, cannot go on forever.
But the counter-argument, they try to present is that maybe we
can do this for long enough. That enough people will think
this is valuable that eventually, we will be able to
stop It's not sure. I don't think people want to
hear me be super cynical and almost pissed off.
But if this is like an accurate representation of what's going
on, I'm just confused. I'm confused because so many
people seem to believe that there is real value here and
that they're doing something totally different and new and
Innovative. Like even as I watched their own
explanation of this, like they're doing weird stuff.
I don't like, why are they pegging the special drawing
rights of the IMF? They're not, what like, oh no.
What see you talking about? Tara s DT, which is meant to Peg
to Str imf's measure of like this commodity group of baskets
and it makes sense. You think that because they talk
about it, like all the time in the white paper and Daquan wrote
a whole paper about how this multi stable coin system,
depends on that specific thing in order to provide liquidity
across these and provide a unit of account that's Global and all
this, but they don't use it anymore.
I mean, it's nominally We used in a couple places in the code
to deal with the math but like the total circulating supply of
that specific token is in like the dozens like not even the
thousands like the dozens because it's not actually how
the system works in. Almost the entire system is in
Tara USD is in regular Terror with some of it in Tara want for
the Korean market and like what about that Mongolian one.
Sure, the sure there may be some of that in it too, but like the
Tara sdt was almost never used and the other reason Don't like
to talk about Tara s DT is because early on they minted a
ton of them like pre minted that like made a bunch of stable
coins out of nothing and then use this to feed into the
protocol to help provide liquidity for every other stable
coin. And so they had effectively pre
mind a bunch of a stable coin. And we're using it to create a
bunch of other stable coins. And then eventually people in
The Forum started complaining about this.
So in the Columbus five upgrade they finally burned all those
But yeah, for a long time, they had this Tara Str which was the
flagship currency for this system, which is now basically
never used that. They minted a bunch out of thin
air and used to provide liquidity for the rest of their
Pairs. And so even when you read the
documentation and you go through the website and you try to
understand how the system works, there's no guarantee that those
are accurate reflections of the current reality help, help me.
Help II know this. Seems so basic and I'm not well
enough informed on Terra. Luna and all of this stuff, but
why do so many people believe in?
Like why do so many people think this is innovative and
interesting and helping and benefiting the cryptocurrency
industry? I think there's a few reasons
for that first, let's start with anchor.
The Lending Market, I already mentioned with a guaranteed,
twenty percent. Yield on a stable coin, you can
convert any of your other stable coins to tear up pretty easily,
and then lend it out and get this 20 percent yield.
Being subsidized by this other group.
So even if you don't believe in the long term longevity of this
system or that this can go on forever, whatever other things
terraform Labs is telling you, if you're a Trader, something it
still might make sense to use it for now.
So you can basically take the money out of terraform Labs
pocket and put it into your own because they're subsidizing it,
right? Besides that.
If you go back to the original, Ico of Luna, the initial 1
billion of the supply, 30% of that went to the founders and
then 26% went to Your capitalists at rates of either
18 cents or 80 cents going to miss.
Sorry. The price of Luna peaked at over
100, at one point. So VCS who got into this early
had like 100 X or 500x return already on their Investments.
And so for them, they've made this massive amount but they
can't exit, 26 percent of the supply at that price without
getting enough. Other people interested in the
system right without increasing the overall liquidity of the
system, besides that, the supplement Subsidized anchor
rate isn't just benefiting people who use it directly but
if you remember like we discussed this a little bit in
our Wonderland. Episode Abracadabra is dejenne
box that was done by like Danny and sifu would go through the
anchor lending Market. 10 times, we hypothecated each time.
So you're using like 10x leverage on this 20 percent
guaranteed yield. So then all the crypto de gens.
See, this super easy way to get this absolutely absurd.
Yield on what's effectively supposed to be a staple coin
that should never change in value.
Now beyond that we get The current phase of how to
quantize. Convincing everyone to love him.
And that is, he's literally like buying off communities.
He announced first with Luna Foundation guard that they were
going to purchase ten billion dollars worth of bitcoin.
This fundamentally changes the math around the stability for
Luna and Tara and makes the built-in reflexivity that
supposed to protect the peg materially worse because now
instead of going into Luna, when people go to Arbitrage, they're
likely going into BTC as these firms do open market operations
to try to defend the pack but but It's still worthwhile for
them because now bitcoiners can't criticize Daquan and Tara
because he owns or he will own 10 billion Bitcoins and then he
goes on and he's like, you know what, we should do the same
thing with Avalanche, 10 billion dollars worth of bitcoin.
I just want to say that so that people don't say, there's only
21. Yeah.
And about 10 million dollars with Bitcoin.
And now they're doing the same thing with Avalanche, right?
I'm going to Foundation guard announce the next asset, they're
going to require is Avalanche. So now, if you're a red triangle
supporting Avalanche, do you really want to?
Out and criticize do Quantum Tara when they're purchasing and
providing this, like, buying pressure for your token.
And so people love Tara because they're either making money on
it directly using the lending Market making money on it,
indirectly by using other defy products, like, Abracadabra box
at depend on that subsidized yield or because Daquan is going
out and trying to, like buy off their communities.
I think what I'm so frustrated about again, if it's description
is entirely accurate, which obviously you're my co-host and
I trust you and I believe you. I think I'm getting frustrated
because there is nothing Innovative about everyone going,
I'll be able to get out of the Ponzi before the next guy that's
the oldest scam in finance. It's the oldest scam in finance.
It's so boring and it's not just boring.
It's infuriating because I understand that people will
never learn that lesson. I get it.
We're it's like a human psychological trait to be like
I'm smarter than everybody else. Get it.
I'm not everybody's guilty of that at some point.
That's fine. But I still don't understand why
there's so much. This is such a Novation.
Do Quan is such a genius. Everybody pay attention to this
and I'm like, I still don't get it.
I still don't understand why, why should I be paying attention
to this because of 20% yields? Because it's now I guess it's
how big how many billions of dollars 18 billion?
I think 18 Bill. Okay yeah just about 18 billion.
Which also also pausing for a moment.
That's the other crazy thing. They're buying 10 billion
dollars worth of bitcoin to collateralize, effectively 18
billion in this floating stable coin, that is supposed to be
entirely collateralized by their governance token.
There's so much money floating around here, like numbers that
like barely make sense. When you think about them and
it's That's a lot of money. Ten billion dollars that's half
the fucking market cap of the stable coin so he's already been
subpoenaed by the SEC. Yes, though.
He claims it doesn't count which we talked about a little bit in
our episode with John Reed Stark.
Yeah. Right.
He can claim whatever he wants. That's fine, but they have
subpoenaed him, right? Yes.
Okay. And their claims are what I
think it's mostly related to the mere protocol which was built on
top of the Sheen, and was meant to provide a way to trade
synthetic assets. And so, they were creating a
synthetic derivatives of us Securities and trading them
through their market. So you could buy like a token
Peg to Tesla, and the SEC says that still happening?
Not 100% sure, I'd have to double-check that but, yeah, the
SEC said, yeah, we don't we don't like that.
That goes against our rules because clearly it does.
I understand neither of us are lawyers and I'll preface that
before I asked this question at all, but I guess I'm just
wondering. Is there anything even a Legal
about what's going on with Luna and Tara.
Or is this just kind of like an unworkable business model and
when it fails well, hate to say, I told you.
So, kind of situation. I mean, I don't know.
That's always the question, right?
And this is, this is really one of my challenges with this
protocol. So they did in Ico in February
of 2019, right? That is well, after the dowel
report, that is, after several, of Jay, Clayton speeches, which
he said, every Ico I've seen is a security sale if they sold any
tokens, That I see. Oh I think there's a good
chance. They sold unregistered
Securities to us, persons in that would be illegal.
The SEC is still trying to determine if what they did with
mere is legal or not. I think there is plenty of
reason to be skeptical that it was.
And then it gets, kind of, kind of tricky, because what's the
difference between a coin trying to become the new Global unit of
account, by creating Faith, using an unsustainable strategy
and a Ponzi scheme? The Science is pretty narrow.
Often will be determined on how it plays out, right?
Like if Tara was somehow successful in convincing enough
people that this is what they should be using.
And there was enough exoticness demand in liquidity, maybe they
could turn off some of the unsustainable things and it
would continue to work. I have my skepticism about
pegged Assets in general, we talked about that a little bit
when Francis Coppola was on, but it's not clearly fraud, it's not
clearly illegal, it's Be clearly ill-conceived right.
I think that's what I'm trying to express as my frustration.
Is that this is so obviously similar to pass schemes.
I guess what I'm perceiving is that it's called an algorithmic
stable coin and that's like a pretty hot hip happening idea,
right now. I don't get that either.
I don't understand the obsession with like algorithmically trying
to stabilize an asset class. Like I don't I don't get it.
So that's that's because You're trying to think through it as a
way to like legitimately create a stable unit of account.
That's not really why algorithmic stable coins exist,
right? Like there's a reason they pop
up every time there's a big defy search.
And because they depend on this Alchemy of essentially, creating
something from nothing, it is very easy to play games with
them, right? Set up a lending game setup, a
whatever game that could run for a long enough.
That a lot of people make money from it.
And it doesn't matter if it eventually fails because we told
everyone, It was an experiment. We weren't sure this was going
to work. We're out here, trying new
things. We're Builders.
Don't you? Stand on the sidelines and
criticize, get out there and help build.
That's another one that came up. Recently is Andre wrote, what
was it a sub stack post or sub? Stacker medium.
It was a Blog is blogging. Pretty short one.
Just kind of saying like we're redoing Finance which is
something you have set up very often and his his critique seem
to be that they're just repeating all the same mistakes
of the past and doing it very quickly, like we've said, it's
kind of like speed running the past thousand years of Finance,
but people got pretty upset about it.
I guess, or at least some people did.
Some people were like, very into it but some people were upset
about it because they were like, oh, mr.
Test and production, who's like, essentially put out a bunch of
garbage. Although I mean, isn't isn't
yearn doing fine? Why iron?
I don't know what they call it whatever.
I think it's still running other past Andre projects are no
longer running. And I think that's I read the
piece in question and I think that Andre has some really good
points. He talks at one point about how
the crypto culture. Essentially, the degeneracy, the
taping into these things. The number go up, type Community
around, it has kind of smothered the crypto ethos of like,
censorship, resistance mutability resiliency and trying
to build these like power Full anti-state systems and I think
that he's right. Like obviously, though, I don't
like, that's not even. That's not a.
Yeah, that's, I guess. I'm like, that's not that clever
of an aside. Like, yeah.
All of us, know, all of us. Know that already.
It's fucking obvious. It's been obvious since 2018.
I think the issue is, he's the worst messenger for that
message, right? Because the entire time you're
reading it, you're just like, God.
You're such a fucking hypocrite. Oh yeah, we need regulated
entities, mr. Phantom wallet.
Okay. Yeah sure we hear Yeah, and it's
like, it's not that he's wrong and I don't mean necessarily
think a lot of the people criticizing him her necessarily
saying he's wrong it's he's made a lot of money from this like,
89 figure type money and now he's like, we need Regulators to
protect the investors. My dude, you're the one with the
money from all the investors and so it's really disingenuous that
way. It was kind of my feeling
reading it. I'm kind of stupefied by All of
this, like I'm kind of like, I don't really know how to react
to any of this where I don't, I don't see the utility in Tara
even though that's like what it talks about on when you go to
the website, I mean they talk about how easy and simple this
is going to be and how great it's going to be for everyone,
to be able to like move in and out of every currency in the
world with such ease because that's like really hard to do
without tara not that I've ever traveled outside of America and
had to exchange. You know what honestly I'll tell
you something. One of the Brokerages that I've
used. I had a savings account with
them as well and all ATM fees were paid for, and if I took
money out, from an international ATM, whatever international fees
were also totally paid for. So I guess I don't get it.
I guess at the end of the day I just don't get it.
It's genuinely not that hard to move money around.
We don't need 200 different. Stable coins.
We certainly don't need 200 different algorithmic.
Stable coins and we certainly don't need the algorithmic.
Stable coins to like, grow bigger than, like, 18 billion
dollars is so much money, man. And like the idea that it's
essentially catching up to tether, which is like tethers,
already bad. Why are we making things?
Even murkier, more complex and worse, which I didn't even think
was possible. Like tether is as opaque as it
gets about their reserves, so you thought?
Yeah, Never Say, Never man, so do Quan appears in 2019 after
going to Stanford forms terraform Labs is injected with
like billions of dollars from investors.
I don't, I don't get it. I want to get it.
I want to understand it. I want to think that there's
something here. I don't want to be this cynical
asshole, who's saying, like, dude, this seems like a scam
again. But why does it feel that way?
Because there's a guaranteed 20% interest rate because there's a
guaranteed 20% interest rate because you here Are people
telling you that they can guarantee a twenty percent
interest rate? That's why it feels like a scam.
Yeah. Because if I told you tomorrow
invest today and I can guarantee you a 20% return, you would go.
Fuck off. I'm not signing up for your
Ponzi scheme because that's, that's the pitch of a fucking
Ponzi scheme. Bernie Madoff did what?
Like, 12 percent per annum over the years and and and declines
guaranteeing 20%, we're supposed to go off the future of
decentralized Finance, delicious.
If this isn't even the worst, this isn't that Seen 150%
guarantees, we've seen crazy and that we've got Justin creating
his own algorithmic stable coin promising, to back it with 10
billion dollars worth of crypto assets.
He's gonna go and buy and guaranteeing, a 30 percent
interest rate you decide. Let's go 50% above 20 and see
what we can do. In his logic is we see so many
people using tether on Tron that we figured.
They need their own stable coin. Collateralized by Tron, you know
what, I am really happy for Justin about I am Glad he is
getting use out of that Ambassador appointment because
without that shit, he would go. Absolutely to prison.
So Bravo Justin, what is it? His Excellency.
I'm so glad that you were making proper.
Use of that ambassadorship, you know, enjoy your little prison
in Switzerland, where you can't leave now through another worst
part. Sure.
It's broken at a more basic level than we've even discussed
here, right? Like we're discussing how the
economics, make no sense but like Actual protocol design for
the cryptocurrency makes no sense and Do Kwan and
terraformed Labs can effectively kick other nodes out of
consensus for like the Block Chain itself.
So, in order to be a validator on Tara like on the cosmos chain
that's actually running all this.
You are expected to participate in the Oracle voting process.
To help make this easy terraform Labs has provided their own
Oracle price, feeder that you can configure in your validator,
that will automatically post the numbers.
Sarah formlabs gives you to the chain and vote on them for you
making the entire process, vastly more simple.
So the vast majority of oracle's have adopted.
This what this effectively means is that no one else can run a
different price feeder now, because if they vote out of band
like different from what Tara formlabs Oracle price, feeder is
suggesting they will get kicked out of consensus even if their
number is right and terraformed Labs number is wrong and this
exact thing has already resulted In erroneous, liquidations on
anchor, The Lending platform and wait, I'm not done yet.
Almost all of those liquidations were bought up by terraform
Labs, who was front, running it because they didn't need to wait
for the Oracle price to hit the chain because it's coming from
their own feed. So they knew to immediately
start bidding as these were liquidated before the values
were at you posted on chain, is when there was this massive
multimillion-dollar liquidation. Terraform Labs, is the one
buying up all those collateral from the people they wrongly
liquidated. It's Fucking Arthur.
Hays, running a prop desk. Right, so it's centralized its
trading against its own users. Who knows what the Privacy
Dynamics are of any of this and The Innovation is 20% per annum
interest for give me more about things they were doing.
Sorry, go on look, a year ago, they announced project Dawn in
which they were going to start unlocking about 300 million
dollars worth of Luna every single month and promised a
monthly transparency report on each of these unlocks.
That would describe But they were using the funds for guess
what? There was Zero of those?
Yeah it's amazing. You knew there wouldn't be
transparency reports. It's like you've done this
before. This is one of these times where
I genuinely feel completely deflated about the industry.
There's things that bother me that excite me, right?
Like I think tether did that for me.
Whereas like actually exciting and interesting, while I was
bothered by it, while it pissed me off, I think what's going on
in El Salvador is equal parts, fascinating and horrifying.
I think the Ukraine and Russian response in regard to the
cryptocurrency industry. Totally interesting.
Like there's there's a lot to unravel and unfold and talk
about there. When this kind of thing happens,
I feel bad because I understand that it's going to sound like a
broken record, but I just feel so bad.
I feel like there's nothing anyone can do for this industry.
If this is the kind of people and projects that everyone wants
to support. I mean like I don't think anyone
is explained how the fuck the North, Koreans stole six hundred
million dollars worth of axi infinity bullshit.
You know, they're etherium like the right.
I mean they kind of did because it was all controlled by one.
Tootie, right? And so they had to do is
compromise one entity and steal the key there.
You fucking go. This is what I'm saying.
Dude, this is what I'm trying to say is that like the basic
inherent issues that were trying to be solved for, at the
beginning of cryptocurrency through to, like 2016 2017, that
people like seem to care about was like okay it shouldn't be
centralized. We should be concerned about
privacy, there's going to be volatility, we're going to need
to speculate. They like it was like some level
of admittance and suggestions. As to what was positive about
this space. And when I see stuff like this,
get popular, I feel like, oh, wow, most people involved in
this space. Don't actually give a fuck about
any of the interesting stuff like this table coin isn't
interesting, it's not interesting.
And this story isn't interesting to me, you're just telling me a
bunch of bad shit that some asshole did that is going to
cause people a lot of money one day and that maybe he'll never
go to prison for and you know, it was an experiment.
Okay. I guess this just proves how
dumb people Our or that we're repetitive in our habits or that
psychologically. We are just prone to get
scammed, I don't know man. But it doesn't fill me with any
sort of Hope or interest or like drive to fix things.
It has the utterly opposite effect.
Crypto culture has strangled crypto ethos sound Ray said,
yeah. But he talked about it like it
was some optimistic Thing by the end.
He was saying like, I'm look, I'm still looking forward to
what this industry brings and blah blah blah.
And I'm like, when I hear these stories, if anything it makes me
Ego like, man. Maybe this is the wrong industry
for me. I'm like I'll stick around.
There's enough interesting stories for sure.
But like, when I hear these stories, I am far less inclined.
Like, there's no way I'm going to have her talk about Terra
again. There's no way.
I just don't care, I just do not care.
Yeah, it was fascinating to me because I write about these
stable, Queen protocols, pretty often, right?
But like, as I'm reading it, I'm like, this is just bit you as
D-Day and Larimer tried this years ago and that's fucking day
in their armor. Like Why are we reach reading
the ground? That 10 Lambert already did.
There has to be more exciting things to try.
Apparently not. Yeah.
And apparently not, that's my point.
That's the point that I'm making, I think right now is
that it like this is who people are pointing to.
This is the project that people are pointing to and saying like
this is changing everything. We're going to publish this and
the lunatics the terror Community are bad, they're
really fucking bad on Twitter. They are there every community.
E is xrp, is fucking atrocious and poisonous, you know, owner,
but they're like the old xrp army before they safe Moon.
People were fucking horrifying. Everybody who has their
Community is strictly bags. That's when we were talking to
Colin. I'm just like dude building a
community around like we need the number of this thing to go
up. It doesn't breed a healthy
community at all. At all, it just makes a bunch of
assholes who spent a bunch of Time, online attacking, anybody
who's being critical or like genuinely.
Trying to look into something for people.
And again where's the Innovation?
Where is the substance to any of this?
I was hoping that when we talked about this, there would be some
fucking Saving Grace something that you could point to.
That would be like, well actually here's the interesting
part of Tara, her actually. Here's the interesting part of
Luna or they're doing this, really interesting.
Algorithmic, I'd like whatever. But no you're just like, well,
they're hoping to get too big to fail and, you know, probably not
going to happen, but I guess it might maybe who knows.
And I'm like this story sucks. The story fucking sucks.
Yeah, the best case. For them, is that they become
the global like way to exchange value.
And you, and I end up in an institution, do the
ramifications of that? Yeah, I get it.
They all want to be the fucking world's Reserve currency.
There's still nothing interesting about that.
Fuck, man, this is what I'm saying.
Decentralization is interesting, privacy rights when it comes to
money. That interests me.
That stuff is actually fucking interesting.
This stuff is not fucking interesting, dude.
It is not fuck well in this It gets that kind of the part that
really bothers me about Tara is how often that their marketing
is where the true decentralized able coin.
Don't look at me, what because it's got USD, see backing don't
look at whatever because of these somewhat probable, like
points of articulation, and points of centralization.
And then they take 56 percent of their original Supply and
distributed between themselves and Venture capitalists.
They have a way to kick nodes, out of consensus.
They are subsidizing the entire demand for this token out of
their Ico funds. This, this is the gold standard
for decentralized stable coin. Then fucking hand it in.
Stop trying to make fucking stable coins.
Then you've lost, if this is the best you can do you failed?
You failed. That's the last point.
I want to make because I there do seem to be the all these
people like who were in to do Quan or who think cesta was a
genius or think Seafood is great.
I remember reaching out to someone well-known in the space
I'm not going to name names and saying I don't get why anyone
likes Max Keiser or Michaels? Dollar or whatever.
Max Keiser, Michael sailor. Somebody else might have been
Tok Wan and might have been someone else.
And I just said, like, I don't get why the space takes any of
these people seriously in any sense and their response to me
was they don't dude. Nobody of substance or anyone
who actually cares about the cryptocurrency industry takes
those two lunatics. I mean in the actual word takes
them seriously. So I don't know what it is.
I don't know if there's a disconnect and like some retail,
people just are super into some of this stuff or if there's too
much VC, capital and hedge funds and That's again, just the stuff
that makes me feel so sick about this industry because there's
nothing you and I can do about it.
Truly there's nothing we could say, critically about Tara
that's going to matter because this is, this is there, this is
their game plan, right? And like, I know that this did
we're not going to change anyone's mind with this episode.
So I like, I just, I don't know. I don't know what.
I don't know how to respond to that as a Critic.
I guess at the end of all this, I think we got kind of close to
talking about this a little bit when Gerard was on the
cryptocurrency industry. Is almost like several different
layers of Industry each moving in somewhat different directions
in pulled by different forces, right?
Like there's so much turnover in the cryptocurrency industry that
at any time, like the bulk of Market participants is people
who have joined in like the last two years but then like the bulk
of Market dollars are dictated by these massive Market making
and Venture Capital funds that we talked about back in our
Cumberland episode and then like the bulk of development work and
like research and Thought that goes into these cryptocurrency
systems, is by people who have been around for years, right?
And so, like, you'll talk with Bitcoin developers and they
still care about a lot of the things Bitcoin is supposed to
care about, right? But they're a very tiny
percentage of both the market in terms of people and the market.
In terms of dollars, The Venture capitalists went things that
they can grow fast and get liquidity from and Retail once
projects that they can make a quick Buck on.
And so the minority of people who are interested in
cryptocurrency purely to solve the Aging questions around
decentralisation censorship resistance privacy and
resiliency are not that important because they don't
command the massive money that can move things.
And they don't command the massive armies of people that
drive interest in these things. And so they continue to get
pressed further and further to the sidelines.
Yeah, yeah. I think that's a good point to
end on. We're really bad point,
depending on how you look at it either way.